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New York and Washington, DC (CNN) – Dear East Coasters, this is the deal with that massive 17-year cicada invasion you’ve been expecting.

It’s here.

What, you haven’t seen any? You’re not alone.

“We’re definitely not hearing them yet,” said Bonnie McGuire, deputy director New York City Urban Park Rangers while searching through Inwood Hill Park, a natural forest in Manhattan. “When we do, we’ll definitely know it.”

McGuire didn’t hear or see any cicadas. Neither did most of the people CNN Radio spoke with in Virginia, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. After months of hype over what was billed as a wonder of nature, replete with billions of cicadas, many residents along the Atlantic are shrugging their shoulders. FULL POST

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(CNN) - There’s an old quote from Mister Rogers that has been circulating on Facebook since the Boston Marathon bombings.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news” Fred Rogers wrote in his book on parenting, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

That idea – look for the helpers – is a thread that ties together so many disparate stories.

It’s an uplifting perspective changer on the news that is breaking in Boston on this Friday before Earth Day. FULL POST

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(CNN) – Take a ride with me on a major thoroughfare in Los Angeles. The city's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, just announced that all 4400 traffic signals along all 7000 public roadways are synchronized.

We wanted to find out exactly what that means for drivers.

[1:24] “I’m kind of ashamed to admit this but I think traffic lights are incredibly cool.”

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(CNN) - The meteor that wreaked havoc in Russia last week, shattering windows around a 50-acre area and injuring 1,200 people, was not as big as the asteroids that Dr. Bong Wie of Iowa State University is worried about.

He's researching how to stop one of the 400 asteroids scientists have discovered, which have some chance of crashing into Earth and potentially destroying a city.

Wie has gotten NASA’s attention with a plan that seems right out of the Hollywood blockbuster "Armageddon." He is working on a plan to bury a nuclear bomb into a potentially deadly asteroid and blow it up into tiny pieces:

[1:05] “Our plan is relatively simple. Using a nuclear device and using current spacecraft technology, we will be able to mitigate the impact threat from an asteroid with very short warning time.”